Querencia

The party season! Rapturously welcomed by some; by others, greeted with fear and loathing. But everyone understands that in some social situations there are shoals, and these have to be navigated with care. Some demand of you a facility for small talk, which some of us simply don't have, requiring us to make do with what we have, or to veer sharply to one side or another of the reef. Then there are those special perils, the awful bores. These are all the more difficult to circumvent because--unlike the shoals that lurk hidden by at least a few inches of water--the bores are more like stalagmites, rising directly between you and your objective: the bar, the beautiful widow, your best friend.

The questions arise: How to maneuver? What to do? What to stress?

I had a professor who took to writing me four or five times a week for several years, many of his letters seven or eight pages long and almost all of them describing his then-current plight. One of his plights lasted about nine months and had to do with his failure to pay enough money to the IRS a year or two earlier. I don't think Dante devoted more pages to The Inferno than my professor did to whether, how, at whose expense and with what recrimination he should come up with the $1300, plus interest and maybe a penalty, to pay Internal Revenue.

His obsessive quandary became amusing enough, after six or seven months, to cause me to makemention of it at lunch to a friend in common. My tax-torn professor knew the great French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel intimately, I only in my capacity as a protégé of the professor. I recounted at lunch the agonies with which my friend belabored in his letters the question of his taxes. And M. Jouvenel smiled and said yes, he knew the professor was that way about all matters, had always been that way. "And it astonishes me, for so intelligent a man. Because every subject in the whole world is more interesting than oneself," said M. Jouvenel, some years before writing his autobiography.

In fact, I think him quite wrong. I don't pretend that my friend mightn't have seized on a more interesting subject than his tax delinquency, but I remember reading all those letters withfascination because they composed, really, a portrait of his mind, which--it happened, happily--was among the most interesting I have ever encountered. It was all there: extraordinary analytical skills, extraordinary capacity for self-justification; paranoia, an innocent perplexity, dependence, a capacity to exfoliate from a routine problem a comprehensive weltschmerz about our life and times.

But for some reason, the general social rule--don't talk about your personal concerns--continues to govern, especially at large parties where social contacts are fleeting and especially at large parties of the kind that generally abound at holiday time. These parties are an institutional imperative, so that just as the blossoms come out in May, so do the large parties constellate about the holiday season. It is then that it is likelier that the ratio betweenthe people you know and the people who are simply there becomes smaller and smaller. It is thenthat, entering the auditorium, you scan the horizon anxiously in search of a familiar face. Andhaving found one, what do you talk about?

Here is my point! Talk about his affairs. M. Jouvenel is wrong in this matter, and I will give you a hypothetical example. The man you recognize is a banker. Yesterday the Labor Party beat the Likud Party in a general election in Israel. The day before that, Gerald Ranck played 31 Scarlatti sonatas at the New York Society for Ethical Culture auditorium, the same day that John McEnroe defeated Ivan Lendl at the French Open in Paris. Hypothetical question: Unlessyou know your mark extremely well, what reason do you have to suppose that he will discourse onany of these events authoritatively, originally or amusingly?

The answer is, you have no grounds for faith in the matter. You do know that the man you have just approached is interested in banking. If it happens that he is a banker only because his father made him vice president at the age of 22 and he has secretly hated banking ever since, my rule still applies: You are in rare luck, because he can confide to you how much he hates his profession, how filthy, rotten, boring and exploitative it is, and that makes for interesting banter. More likely he is a banker because banking is his thing, so that you can come up with something that encourages him to expatiate there and then on a subject he knows a great deal about, and your question will inflame his didactic spirit.

"Say, Elmore, about the discount rate--is it possible in the futures market to gamble on the discount rate down the line, say, six months or maybe a year?"

I don't happen to know the answer to that question, but I can promise you, sight unseen, that a banker--or, for that matter, a broker, or an economist, or an informed businessman--will gambol off that question for just about as long as you want him to. By this I mean that if he tries to give you an objurgatory reply ("Course not!"), you are still left free to draw him out ("But explain to me exactly why not. It seems to me that...").

As he winds into the subject, you can keep him wound up. The subject at hand will inevitablyabut on another question and you skate right along with him. One thing you absolutely know is that he will be saying more interesting things to you than in answer to the question "How do youaccount for Ross Perot's appeal?" The reason for this is that you have, in the past eight months, read more about Perot than about AIDS, the rich and the homeless. So the chances are infinitesimal that you will hear anything new or engaging on the subject. But you are talking to a banker and he does know about the vagaries of the discount rate. Moreover, he can illustrate his points by recounting personal experiences. And the most interesting experiences are, really, personal. Would you rather read an account of the Battle of Austerlitz or an account of what Napoleon was thinking during that battle?

However, some people are manifestly incapable of saying anything interesting, even about themselves. On the other hand, some people famously dull by reputation can surprise you. It may happen that the dullard you are talking to will decide that this is the moment to confide that during his youth he was a serial murderer. It is unlikely that in recounting whom he murdered, how and why, he can bore you.

But it is true, as I said, that some people can be boring when talking about any subject. I know someone who would cause my mind to wander between the moment he told me he spotted those funny fighter planes coming in over the hills in Honolulu and the moment, only two minutes later, that they were dropping their bombs on Pearl Harbor. With people such as these, either you are or are not qualified to defend yourself.

The British historian and diplomat Harold Nicolson was famous for, among other things, observing in his diaries that 99 people out of 100 are interesting, and the 100th is interesting because he is the exception. Well, if you have the lepidopterist's interest in the rare butterfly, you can manage--by saying to yourself: I will interest myself in this encounter by analyzing and committing to memory the reasons why he or she is such an infernal bore. You begin, in your mind, to frame the list of his vacuities: He is inarticulate. He is repetitious. He laughs incessantly. He tells you in such excruciating detail how many ducks went by before he shot for the first time, that you find yourself toying with stupid tangents. (Is duck overpopulation something of an ecological problem?)

But most of us aren't well developed as bore taxonomists. It is therefore a good idea to develop means of self-defense when, at a party, you find your-self locked in with the great bore. The first line of defense is, of course, to train your face to register appropriate responses: the half-smile, following on his little wink; the eyebrows raised in suspense, as his voice indicates that what he is about to say is a revelation; and the barely enunciated "I'll be damned!" when it is clear that he is saying something he accounts unusual. The French have the all-purpose word, tiens, that is appropriate in absolutely every situation. Depending on the lilt you give it, you can use it to respond to news that your interlocutor's wife has just died of cancer ("Tieeeeeens"), or that he just married Miss America ("Tiens!"). The closest equivalent in English is "I'll be damned." ("I'll be daaaaaamned." "I'llbedamned!")

These are the rudimentary skills to develop--some kind of facial and spoken reaction to what has been said--and if you have had a lot of practice, which, given the unfortunate incidence of bores, almost everybody has had, you can become very good at it. But there has to be a second line of defense.

You catch the word Mabel, and you jump in. Now, you have to be dogged about this. "Mabel?" you interrupt. "Is she related to Susan Mercer?" He looks at you, surprised--he's never even heard of Susan Mercer (nor have you). He is maybe just slightly annoyed, because his narrative was interrupted. (continued on page 182)Querencia(continued from page 100) You need to dig in.

"Who is Susan Mercer? She was Mabel's half sister, wasn't she? You remember, of course, the famous lawsuit? God, what a case! One of my best friends was working at the law firm that took Susan's case. He spent over a year on it, he said, tracking down all the evidence, what with the disappearance of the will and the stepmother's refusal to confirm that Susan had been legallyadopted. I remember the lawyer saying that it--the case, Mercer vs. Mabel What's-her-name--introduced the legal concept of 'pleading in the alternative.' You know: Lawyer stands up, addresses the court and says (1) Mabel didn't have the money, (2) Mabel had the money and it was her right to have it or (3) Mabel had the money but gave it back to Susan." You look up in turn for a reaction. Ah, but your friend has dematerialized.

But that course of action, needless to say, requires a certain histrionic resolve, and most of us don't have it and need then to go to another line of defense. There are several of these, but the easiest to get away with is to gulp down your drink and then confess you must go to thebar and fetch another, but you'll be right back, har-har.

There is the special problem raised by the party at which you have a social objective. Thereare difficulties here because it may be necessary, having spotted your mark, for you to move over to him or her, passing by 11 people with whom, in the normal course, you would feel obliged to dally, even if only for a moment. And then in the pursuit of your quarry, you may find yourself guilty of behavior if not exactly boring, certainly boorish.

I have a memory of this. Along with my wife, I arrived at a boat party with Mrs. Dolly Schiff, whom I liked, who was among my employers (she published my syndicated column in the New York Post, the newspaper she owned) and who was an important political presence in New York at a time when my brother James was its junior senator, preparing to run for reelection. Boarding the boat, Mrs. Schiff said to me: "Do you know, I have never even met your brother?" Well, said I, I shall certainly cure that tonight--I knew that my brother was among the invited guests.

A half hour later, chatting with my brother on the crowded deck, I spotted at the extreme other end the imperious forehead of Dolly Schiff. I grabbed my brother and told him we must forthwith go to the other end of the deck, past the 80-odd people sipping champagne, so that he could be introduced to Mrs. Schiff. Ignoring a dozen old friends, we reached her--at a moment when her head was slightly bent down, exchanging conversation with a petite woman whose back was to us. I charged in, "Dolly, this is my brother Jim, whom you wanted to meet. Jim, Dolly Schiff." The little woman we had interrupted turned around slowly to us and smiled.

She was our hostess, the Queen of England, but it was too late to undo the damage, so I proceeded with the introduction to Mrs. Schiff (Jim had sat next to the queen at dinner and needed no introduction to her; the rest of us had been through the receiving line). Jim said he was sorry to interrupt Mrs. Schiff, who smiled down at Her Majesty. I thought I'd break the ice by suggesting that the entire company join me in pleading with Mrs. Schiff to give me a raise. The queen reacted with a half-smile and excused herself to greet another of her guests. There can becasualties of a determined mission at a party.

It is, of course, the objective of some guests to mingle with absolutely everybody at the party. I remember at the casual cocktail hour in California talking quietly at the edge of a social congregation with the president-elect of Yale University. I told him that a year earlier theoutgoing president, Kingman Brewster, had been at this same affair. "The difference between King and me," Bart Giamatti said, "is that when he walks into a social gathering, his eyes fix instinctively on the center of the densest social activity and he homes right in on it, the true social animal. My own instinct is to look to the farthermost edges of the gathering and head softly in that direction. Where I am standing right now," he said, smiling.

Yes, and that raises the question of one's querencia, a favorite word of mine, one that I learned many years ago from Barnaby Conrad and have tirelessly used. The word describes a tiny area in the bullring, maybe 50 square feet, within which the fighting bull fancies himself entirely safe. The difficulty lies in that each bull has his own idea exactly where his querencia is, and it is up to the matador to divine, from a ferociously concentrated study of the bull's movements as he charges into the ring, its location; because the matador must, at peril to life andlimb, stay well clear of it when executing his critical passes. The bull who finds himself close to his querencia and is pained or perplexed will suddenly head for it, and in doing so jerk his horns in an unpredictable direction, the same direction the matador's groin or abdomen mightfind themselves.

We all have, in any social situation, an undefined querencia, and we instinctively seek it out immediately upon entering the crowded room. Most usually, it is where one's spouse is--but that is a difficult sanctuary to avail yourself of because it is deemed socially backward at a party to glue yourself to your spouse. So you look elsewhere for your querencia. Generally, it is one human being, someone with whom you feel entirely comfortable, whom you can trust to greet you as if your company were the highlight of his day. You have tons to tell him, and he has tons to tell you, all of it of common interest. Is he...she...there? You look around.

No.

Is there an alternative querencia anywhere about?

Well, yes. Somebody told you that Algernon MacNair was going to be there. Not quite the company you most looked forward to attaching yourself to, but quite good enough to avoid the high stilt of tonight's social affair, and there is a specific point of interest. Maybe his oped piece this morning, in which he took those peculiar positions about taxation. But no. He is not there, nor is anyone else who will fill the bill in the same way.

Ah, but then the querencia can be greatly elastic. You can develop a consuming interest in the appointments of the sumptuous apartment. Every picture deserves close attention, worth at least three minutes of your time, as you look first this way at it, then that way, then examine the artist's signature. And the books! You pick up one from the fourth shelf and open it with delight transfiguring your face. How is it that this neglected volume found its place into this library? How discriminating the taste of our hostess! By the time you have examined that book, perhaps two or three others and a dozen pictures and a score of family photographs--it is time for dinner!

With some apprehension you look down at your card and wonder who will be seated on your right, who on your left; and it is at such moments, as when in a foxhole, or on a sinking boat, that you rediscover God and the need to utter a silent prayer.

"The woman we had interrupted turned around and smiled. She was our hostess, the Queen of England."